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website design for nonprofits

Using Your Nonprofit Website as a Fundraising Tool: 4 Tips

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Nonprofit Website as a Fundraising Tool

Your nonprofit’s website serves as the central hub of your nonprofit’s online presence. It hosts your mission statement and information about your programs, enables supporters to get in touch with your organization, and allows potential supporters to organically find your nonprofit online. 

Your nonprofit’s website can also be leveraged as a fundraising tool in your marketing campaigns. Most fundraising campaigns focus on connecting with supporters on other platforms such as social media, email, and even traditional mail. Potential donors are already on those channels and your marketing outreach aims to bring them to your website. 

Your website is a core component of your marketing strategy for your digital fundraising campaigns, and can be leveraged to improve your fundraising campaign’s strategy with these four tips: 

  1. Optimize Your Donation Page
  2. Connect to Social Media
  3. Create a Brand Identity 
  4. Include Interactive Media

These strategies will improve your website’s functionality, design, and content to raise engagement rates, improve donor retention, and make donating more convenient. As you implement improvements, track your donation and interaction rates to understand how your changes impact your campaign. Your data will provide insight as to which choices had positive results and what needs to be refined further. With that in mind, let’s jump in. 

1. Optimize Your Donation Page

Supporters who reach your donation page are at a critical point in their engagement with your nonprofit. At this point, your supporters understand your nonprofit’s mission and are considering donating to the cause. However, donors can still be deterred as some will abandon their donation forms before ever completing their gift. 

To avoid donation form abandonment, create an easier, more convenient donation experience for your supporters by optimizing your donation page to encourage both completed and recurring donations. Here are several strategies you can apply to your donation page to convert donors: 

  • Making sure your donation page is easy to find. Many nonprofits have a donate button visible on their homepage and header, while others embed their donation page directly into their homepage or even on top of their banner or hero image. Your supporters should never be confused about how to access your donation page, so ensure navigation is as easy as possible by providing clear links that direct supporters to your donation form in as few clicks as possible. 
  • Asking only necessary questions. You should ask your donors questions in addition to their payment information such as their contact information and gift amount. However, too many required information fields, especially when they seem unnecessary, can result in donors deciding the form isn’t worth their time. Limit your form to a single page and keep your questions relevant to the immediate donation in order to respect your donors’ time and quickly secure their contribution. 
  • Offering additional engagement opportunities. Many of your donors are interested in supporting your nonprofit beyond their first donation, but you have to give them the option to do so. Offering them further opportunities such as becoming a recurring donor or checking to see if they qualify for a matching gift. After they make their donation, ask donors if they would like to opt-in to receive additional messages about your nonprofit’s activities to stay in touch. 

While not directly supporting your fundraising, always take care to ensure your donation form and payment processor are secure. Supporters may not be wowed into donating by knowing your website is secure, but they will feel more at ease when giving out their financial information. Not to mention, protecting your nonprofit and your donors against data breaches will help build trust and your reputation as a reliable organization. 

2. Connect to Social Media

Social media is likely one of your key fundraising tools as you’re able to reach supporters on the platforms they already frequent. Your social media profiles and posts should link to your website to drive traffic, but your website can also enhance your social media outreach and engagement. 

Your website will be many supporters’ first impression of your nonprofit, but it’s often updated less frequently than your social media profiles. By strategically connecting your social media profiles to your nonprofit, you can present your nonprofit as active, modern, and worthy of donations. In addition to providing links on both your website and social media profiles to drive traffic between the platforms, consider:

  • Integrating your social media feeds. A regularly updated news page on your website shows supporters that your nonprofit is active and consistently making progress toward your mission. However, in addition to creating a series of blog posts to keep supporters up-to-date, you can integrate your social media feeds onto your website so supporters can see what you’re up to on other platforms. This will encourage supporters to engage with you on multiple channels, while also saving your team the time and effort of updating both your accounts and your news page with major updates. 
  • Running social media fundraisers. Social media fundraisers, particularly Facebook fundraisers, are started and managed by supporters raising funds on behalf of your mission. Some nonprofits shy away from social media fundraisers as they have less control over the outcomes. However, as GoodUnited’s guide to Facebook fundraisers points out, while you may have limited control, these initiatives have the potential to raise a lot of funding as supporters encourage friends and family to give. You can support these fundraisers by publishing advice or instructions on your website to encourage supporters to maximize these fundraisers.
  • Engaging in peer-to-peer fundraising. Peer-to-peer fundraisers often also leverage social media as your supporters fundraise on your nonprofit’s behalf. However, these campaigns differ from social media fundraisers as your team starts and manages the campaigns. While most of the outreach you and your supporters conduct happens on social media, your website hosts your supporters’ peer-to-peer fundraising pages, making it the core of your campaign.

You might hesitate to direct traffic away from your website by linking to social media, but you shouldn’t treat your social media profiles and your website as if they are competing with one another. Instead, consider the strengths and marketing opportunities of both to create a cohesive strategy that builds momentum towards your fundraising goal and provides multiple points of engagement. 

3. Create a Brand Identity 

Your nonprofit’s brand should be apparent to any visitor as soon as they open your website’s homepage. Create a brand style guide so all messaging and external communication consistently features your nonprofit’s brand. Your website should follow your style guidelines, but keep in mind that it is also where many supporters will first familiarize themselves with your brand, making its representation of your brand particularly memorable. 

Your website’s design should support your brand, making it more memorable for visitors while conveying additional information about your nonprofit’s mission and approach. For example, as Cornershop Creative’s guide to some of the best nonprofit websites showcases, your brand is more than just your logo, color scheme, and tagline.  

Cornershop Creative’s guide shares this example from Sharsheret’s website to discuss how nonprofits can cement their brand identity with key visual elements:

This homepage makes use of images, particularly its hero image, to visually demonstrate its mission’s focus and invoke emotion in supporters. The hero image has a blurred background, drawing attention to the figure in focus, the woman who has been affected by breast cancer. The use of color, blurred images, and expression of the person in the photo create a sense of peace and trust that an organization focused on medical support would likely want to instill its supporters. 

Visitors to this website will remember the magenta color (which stands out more due to being contrasted with the green of the donation button and hero image), the logo prominently displayed in the upper left hand corner, and their mission to support women. 

As this example shows, your brand and website design should have a specific design goal. Outside of being memorable, consider what images and ideas you want to associate your brand with. As you can often only fit your logo and key colors onto external marketing documents, your website provides invaluable space to explore and reaffirm your brand identity with supporters. 

4. Include Interactive Media 

You can further engage supporters to support your fundraiser by providing interactive media on your website such as petitions, maps, and more. WordPress plugins can enhance your website’s fundraising potential by creating user-friendly and responsive features that prompt supporter engagement. 

As with your other design elements, choose plugins that match your nonprofit’s fundraising goals by acting in service to a specific objective. For example, if you’re seeking volunteers for a major upcoming fundraiser, you may include a pop-up calling for volunteers that appears after supporters submit their donation form. 

Interactive media and plugins both require proper maintenance to remain reliable sources of engagement. Any visual media can break or slow down loading times, so schedule regular checks of your media links into your website maintenance process. Installing updates when they become available can help your nonprofit stay on top of bugs and security vulnerabilities.  

Plugins require additional research to ensure they are secure, reliable, and also won’t slow down your website. Before installing a plugin, check its recent updates and reviews to ensure the developer is still maintaining it and the plugin is legitimate. You can also use online resources like this one to find reliable and up-to-date plugins designed specifically for nonprofit websites.

If you need additional help creating interactive media or integrating plugins, reach out to a nonprofit website builder or design agency. These consultants have years of experience assisting nonprofits setup and optimize their websites, which means they are likely to have the solution for any coding errors or other technical issues preventing your website from reaching its full potential. 

Fundraising campaigns are most effective when they’re supported by their nonprofit’s website. While you might see your website primarily as an informational tool, it also has the potential to raise awareness, encourage donations, and invite continued engagement with supporters interested in donating.

Creating Donation Pages that Convert: 5 Pro Tips

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Online Donation Pages Tips

As we round out a hectic year and look ahead to new challenges and opportunities, it’s worth it to take some time to review the fundamentals and look for small, iterative changes that can yield big results over the next year. 

While many nonprofits consider donor engagement and retention to be their biggest pain points, you also have to consider how you’re securing those supporters in the first place. 

For a nonprofit, the foundation of all your fundraising strategies is your donation page. 

Small issues with your organization’s online donation page can have major effects on your ability to convert visitors into donors, measured by your donation conversion rate. A poor conversion rate means that not many of the visitors who find their way to your donation page actually feel motivated to follow through with making a gift. That’s a serious issue, and it’s one that many nonprofits aren’t even aware is holding them back.

That’s why creating a stronger, high-converting donation page is especially important as we head into the year-end giving season and Giving Tuesday. You definitely don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to secure donations from the higher volume of visitors that organizations typically see around this time. 

That being said, let’s walk through a few pro tips for strengthening your donation page and boosting conversions:

  1. Start with an integrated donation app.
  2. Keep your design simple and mobile-optimized.
  3. Create multiple donation pages and conduct A/B tests.
  4. Use suggested donation tiers to drive revenue.
  5. Create campaign-specific donation pages.

With online-only engagement the new norm for most organizations, your donation page shouldn’t stand between your nonprofit and increased support! These tips are great starting places to begin seeing improvements in your own conversion rate. Let’s dive in.

1 Start with an integrated donation app.

Software integrations are extremely valuable for nonprofits. Their benefits include saving your team’s time and generating data that you can use to improve your fundraising and marketing strategies. 

Most importantly, integrations between your donation page, website, and database or CRM give you increased visibility into how your donation page is performing. Without a clear sense of the number of visitors landing on your donation page and completing transactions, you can’t gauge your conversion rate or begin making data-driven improvements.

Using donation software that integrates with your other tools will be your best bet. If you’re working with a cloud-based, modular-style CRM platform like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, use a donation app that’s specifically designed to integrate with those systems. 

With data automatically flowing from your donation app to your database (and coupled with website data through Google Analytics), you’ll get a complete picture of your donation page’s performance over time. This gives you a solid foundation on which to begin making improvements.

2. Keep your design simple and mobile-optimized.

The design of your donation page can play a major role in how well it converts donors. Simple, intuitive design that doesn’t slow users down is key. Avoid elements like:

  • Too many images or distracting multimedia
  • Multiple pages a donor needs to click through in order to complete a donation
  • Unnecessary fields or required account creation

Any of these elements will slow down your donors when they’re feeling most motivated to give. Make the process as fast and seamless as possible to avoid deterring any potential support. 

As an added bonus, simpler designs typically work much better on mobile devices than complicated pages. Mobile-optimization is critical today with more and more web traffic occurring on mobile devices. If your donation page doesn’t work well (or at all!) on smaller screens, you’re almost certainly losing out on potential donations.

Additionally, the ability to customize and tweak the design of your donation page is a must. This is one reason why payment processing services like PayPal that serve very general needs often aren’t the best choice for nonprofit organizations. For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our Soapbox guide to Venmo and PayPal alternatives for nonprofits. 

3. Create multiple donation pages and conduct A/B tests.

To fine-tune one or more elements of your donation page, we recommend creating multiple versions and conducting A/B tests. Let’s say you want to see which text appeal is more effective at converting donors. Here’s how you’d find out:

  1. Create two versions of your donation page, each with a different message encouraging visitors to make a transaction. One might emphasize how their support will directly impact your mission, and the other might emphasize why their support is so important for your nonprofit amid today’s challenges. Leading donation software should allow you to easily create and customize additional donation pages as needed.
  2. Promote both donation pages to your supporters online via email or social media. Try sending an email that links to one donation page, and then following up with a separate email linking to the other donation page after a week or two.
  3. Review how each page performed. Integrated donation software should make it easy to identify how many visitors and donations each page secured. Make note of these insights, and use them to make updates to your other donation pages over time.

This is a fairly simple example, but A/B testing is an invaluable tool for improving nearly every aspect of your donation page. By strengthening your text appeals, visual design, suggested donation tiers, and more, you can build a high-converting donation page one element at a time.

Even beyond your donation page, A/B testing is an important tactic to have in your arsenal. Use this technique to improve all the elements of your broader digital strategy, like your nonprofit’s marketing materials.

4. Use suggested donation tiers to drive revenue.

Peer pressure and the power of persuasion can be extremely effective for boosting donation conversions. Make sure your donation page includes pre-set suggested donation tiers for donors to consider (in addition to the option to set their own preferred amount).

Use your past donation data to find your average donation amount. Then, build tiers around it, encouraging donors to go just a bit higher. Suggesting an amount makes the donation process even simpler for donors, and highlighting your average donation amount can persuade some visitors to give more than they would have otherwise.

This is an easy way to drive more revenue with very little extra effort, so it’s important to have suggested donation tiers on your pages. This is especially true when you want to maximize revenue during time-bound campaigns and high-volume giving days.

Plus, suggesting donation amounts is a great opportunity to show donors the specific impacts of their gifts. For instance, a gift of a certain amount might buy X number of school supplies for a child or help feed an animal in need for X days. Visualizing the concrete impact of their support is a surefire way to motivate more donors to give.

5. Create campaign-specific donation pages.

By creating separate donation pages for your nonprofit’s various fundraising campaigns, you can put all of these tips and your insights from A/B tests into action.

Giving Tuesday is the perfect example. Create a dedicated donation page specifically for your Giving Tuesday campaign, and link supporters to it in all of your promotional emails, social media posts, and blog posts leading up to the big day. This allows you to target every element of your donation page, like its design, text, and follow-up messages, to that particular campaign.

Plus, creating campaign-specific donation pages drastically simplifies the process of tracking each campaign’s performance. When integrated with your database, transaction and engagement data from each page will be properly reported under the appropriate campaign.

As we round out a whirlwind of a year and look ahead to the year-end giving season, strengthening your nonprofit’s core fundraising foundation is a great use of your time.

As the anchor of all of your online fundraising efforts, your donation pages must pull their weight! There’s no reason why nonprofits should endure poor conversion rates when simple, iterative fixes like the ones in these tips can be easily implemented. Plus, incorporating best practices like software integrations and A/B testing into your regular fundraising approach will benefit your nonprofit well into the future. Best of luck!

Helping Nonprofits Squash Site Bugs

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Nonprofit Discounts WebsitesWhether you’re a Fortune 500 or a bootstrapping startup every legitimate company needs a website – it’s their digital storefront. Managing your company site at times can be a costly move. The constant back and forth between your team and developers isn’t easy. Imagine if you’re in the nonprofit sector, leveraging revenue in the best ways can be challenging to say the least.

That’s why we’re excited to share an exclusive promo for Nonprofit Organization provided by The Bug Squasher.

The Bug Squasher is a tool designed for freelancers, developers, site owners, anyone who manages their website. It video records, annotates, tracks and reports site bugs.

Imagine something is broken on your site, instead of emailing, texting, and/or calling a developer to fix it, you can video record the problem and provide a backend report on information they need to diagnose the issue.

Here’s a demo created by a YouTuber: https://youtu.be/ZpIjZdW5JCg

The Nonprofit Offer To Help Squash Website Bugs:

The Bug Squasher Team is offering the first 100 Nonprofits in 2019 access to the platform for 6 Months at no cost.
To qualify for this offer you need to provide the following:

  1. Proof you are 501c3 nonprofit ie 2-3 images of you and your team at work
  2. Website URL of your Nonprofit
  3. A short 5 sentence summary describing your cause
  4. A short 5 sentence summary listing the impact your cause will have

Email the above to info@thebugsquasher.com with the subject line, “Nonprofit Here”

Rules/ Reminders:

  1. This offer is only for the first 100 Nonprofits that reach out
  2. It expires by 2020
  3. The Bug Squasher reserve the right to deny any organizations ie if it appears information is missing or we are being misled or the organization supports negative causes.
  4. When you share the information we will select a few organizations and write a blog about them and share on our website and social media.
  5. You will be given access to The Bug Squasher


All we ask in return is for good causes big or small to reach out.

Happy Squashing!
–The Bug Squasher Team

 

Capital Campaign Websites: 9 Must-Haves

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Online Giving Website TipsA stand-alone capital campaign website is a great way to supplement printed campaign materials and expand the reach and effectiveness of your effort.

The campaign website works alongside printed materials to broaden the reach and flexibility of campaign messaging. It also offers specialized functionality that makes raising funds easier.

When you consider that a capital campaign often loses up to 4% of gifts due to unfulfilled pledges, online giving becomes an attractive tool for reducing attrition.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to bring your campaign online. Just adding a section to your current site is not a wise move. The features and functions required will overwhelm your normal site—and your potential donors. A stand-alone site tailored to the distinctive needs of a capital campaign is the way to go.

Let’s take a look at the nine parts of a great capital campaign website:

1. The Plan

Include an online presentation of your plan, expanded to include information that would not fit in the brochure: additional copy, project renderings, floorplans, etc.

2. Progress Bar

A progress bar shows your goal (and challenge goal) and tracks progress towards (and above) those benchmarks. The progress bar should be activated only after your campaign kickoff, to show early success.

Online Giving Sites3. Q+A

A good Q+A answers common questions and responds rapidly to questions that may arise through the campaign. This keeps misinformation in check and ensures there is no uncertainty in the minds of donors.

4. Resources

This section provides planned giving information so that donors can consider creative giving options in addition to their cash pledge. A Resources section can also provide downloadable architect’s plans, a masterplan document, or other lengthy pdf files.

5. News

A news feature enables you to keep the campaign fresh by going into depth on particular aspects of the effort and by providing testimonials from key individuals, announcements of campaign milestones, and more.

6. Video

Many of your visitors will like to read about your plans. Others will appreciate a video. This is a great way to bring your plans to life and can be shared via email and elsewhere.

7. Gifts Table

The venerable gifts table shows the sizes and numbers of gifts required to make your campaign a success. Bring the gifts table online.

8. Gifts Calculator

A calculator enables donors to see that they are capable of giving more than they might have guessed when the gift is broken into smaller payments. Donors can enter a total pledge and see how much would be given on an ongoing basis to meet that commitment. Alternately, they can enter what their payments might be and see what their gifts would add up to—the total pledge. Those little payments over 3-5 years can really add up.

9. Pledge Form

A secure pledge form enables recurring online giving so that donors can pay digitally on a recurring basis, dramatically reducing pledge attrition and enabling online giving to more than pay for itself.

You now know the nine key content features for your capital campaign website. But how the site is programmed is also important. Here are a few things to consider: 

Mobile-friendly: Your site needs to be built using responsive design so that it functions on smaller devices and serves the 20-40% of your audience viewing it from a smartphone.

Visually Consistent: While it is a different medium from printed materials, your site should share the same visual look and appear to be a natural extension of your other communications.

Secure: The site must be hosted securely to keep sensitive data safe and to reassure donors that you take their privacy seriously.

Easy to Update: A content management system allows administrators easy access to update the site and view gifts to keep the site fresh, keep campaign administrators informed, and reduce developer fees in the long run.

Easy to Maintain: Could you cobble together a pile of WordPress plugins to get the function you need? Maybe. But over the life of the campaign (3-5 years), plugin updates will occur that cause conflicts and feature failures. Troubleshooting those can take many hours and can lead to a bad experience for donors.

 The GivingTools Solution

You have a number of options. You can:

  1. Try to fit the above content in your current website.
  2. Build a site from scratch that provides this function (will it be done before the campaign is over?).
  3. Partner with a resource that provides capital campaign websites.

GivingTools provides a ready-made solution for capital campaign websites. Indeed, GivingTools is the only service that offers this. For a single fee (well under $1,000), GivingTools takes a pdf of your campaign materials and creates the entire site in just a few days. Secure hosting for 3-5 years is included at no extra cost. And if you want to allow online pledge payments, that can also be enabled, for just $14.95/month. That includes payments from banking accounts (ACH) for just 25 cents per payment…no percentages taken.

This resource makes creating your campaign site a piece of cake. You get a robust solution that meshes with your other communications and provides the convenience and power of online giving, all in a matter of a few days!

By planning on a capital campaign site, your campaign brochure can be a compelling overview that leads people to the site for more details. If a donor loses a pledge card (or wishes to make an additional commitment), it is simply a click away. And with online giving, unfulfilled pledges (3-4% of total pledges) can be dramatically reduced.

To see some examples of what a capital campaign site from GivingTools looks like, just visit givingtools.com. If done right, a dedicated capital campaign website can help maximize the success of your next capital effort.

 

Crucial Website Design Tips for Nonprofits

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website design tips for nonprofitsAccording to the Nonprofit Handbook written by Gary M. Grobman, “a nonprofit organization (NPO) or not-for-profit organization is an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals rather than distributing them as profit or dividends”. In today’s time, a NPO just like commercial businesses, has to walk hand-in-hand with the latest technologies for dissemination of relevant information about themselves as well as about the cause they stand for. This undoubtedly starts with the right website.

Below are given the points not-to-be missed while designing an NPO website. These factors if taken care of will not only increase the chances of a NPO website being discovered on search engines and social media, but also would bring an influx of regular visitors and eventually volunteers/donors/personnel.

1. Let the website’s theme be ‘Compassion’: The foundation of any NPO lies in a cause they support. This could be literacy, environment, energy, education etc.

  • An NPO’s website foremost should clearly depict this cause and their mission statement.

  • Images/compelling videos/graphs/charts used on the website to educate people about their cause should be able to evoke compassion and compel the visitors to at least stay longer on the website.

2. Bring focus to the Cheerleaders: Any NPO website should bring out its cheerleaders before its readers and potential followers.

  • A section on the website should focus on the successful projects and events organized by the NPO.

  • Testimonials by industry leaders, donors and volunteers should be included in form of videos and text.

  • Profiles of key personnel, board of directors and industry- & market- giants associated with the NPO, should be a part of the website, under a separate section.

  • The companies that partner with the NPO or which support the NPO through sponsorships and funds, should be listed on the NPO’s website under ‘Partnerships’.

3. Be Inspirational: A big contribution to any nonprofit is from the numerous people who devote their time, effort and money. These volunteers usually resonate and relate to the mission of the NPO. Hence, their website should be volunteer-friendly.

  • The message from past volunteers should speak about the joy of volunteering. This would keep the existing base of volunteers motivated as well as would attract other people to come forward in any form they can.

  • The website should present different ways in which someone can volunteer with them. A separate page should be devoted mentioning these options, which readers can choose from and contribute according to their convenience.

4. Being Donor-philic: Any NPO is highly dependent on funds raised at various events or the generous donations by their donor base. It is of critical importance that their website asks for ‘Donation’ in very simple form. A few things to be remembered are given below-

  • The donation process should be a single-step. Just a click of button and the website visitor should be directed to the donation form.

  • The donation form should not ask for unnecessary and too much information (this may put off the interested donor).

  • The user should not be asked to create an account before he can donate.

  • After the donation, make the donor feel welcome and his donation should be appreciated by giving him a choice to share his generosity on social media profiles like Facebook/Twitter/Google+ etc. This would be the NPO’s way of thanking him as well as a way to pull more donors from his network.

5. Come across as Informational/educational: Any NPO website should be seen as a storehouse of information concerning the cause they support.

  • Have a ‘News/latest updates’ section where latest information from the concerned field can be flashed.

  • The news items or pieces of information can be elaborated on a blog post. This would make the audience keep returning to the website to keep themselves abreast as well as to learn more.

  • The NPO can have a  forum where the queries of readers can be welcome and responded to. This would help the NPO establish itself as experts in their area.

6. Feel proud in being ‘Shareable’: The website as a whole and every page/post should have social media sharing buttons. This will increase followership as well as the visibility on search engines.

5. Be consistent in branding: Branding is all about having loyal followers. Any company/product/NPO becomes a brand after a series of regular and consistent marketing efforts.

  • The logos/fonts/colors used on the website should be consistent with the other promotional material used by the NPO. This would make it easily recognizable and also, will stay in memory longer.

  • The social media sharing buttons should be displayed in a way that they blend with the entire look and feel of the website.

6. Keep it simple & original: Originality and simplicity are the key to any website’s success.

  • Right from the textual content to the images/videos should be original. These should not be copied. Being original is the sign that the nonprofit is really concerned about the cause they support. Also, the photos should not be stock photos. More people donate to real pictures than to stock photos.
  • The website should not be cluttered with loads of information presented in bright colors. The look should be compassionate, professional and human.
  • The websites should always prominently display ‘Contact Us’ form, and wherever possible, a contact number should be given. Very often people prefer to give a quick call rather than writing a long email.

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